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How to turn bad sales prospects into good
ones
by Valerie Minard from Spirituality.com
"I wasn't getting enough, wasn't getting my
share," said Mary (not her real name), a
vice president at a major bank who handles
commercial real-estate loans in
Pennsylvania.
A few years ago, just after 9/11, business
had slowed down. Mary was anxious because
there weren’t enough loan requests coming
in, and these are the meat and potatoes of
her work. So her boss assigned her to work
with new customers who hadn't done business
with her bank before.
Brand new prospects like these have a
reputation for being more difficult to work
with than long-time customers because you
don’t know what their needs are. Also, they
usually like to bargain shop, checking a
large number of banks for quotes. With
long-time customers you know what their
needs are, so it's easier to make
competitive loans.
While starting on this new project, Mary
discovered that one of her colleagues, a
senior vice president, had gotten first pick
of the prospect list. Feeling undermined and
undervalued, Mary went to her boss to see if
there was a way to more fairly distribute
the workload. Although he said he would try
to do something he never did.
I was very frustrated
"I was very frustrated by that," she says
now. She felt short-changed.
Although it would have been easy to let
anger and resentment eat away at her, Mary
knew she had a choice to make. She could
either stew about the unfair treatment or
look higher for a solution. She chose
prayer. Her first step was to quiet her
thought and listen to what God had to tell
her. Mary likes to think about God as
infinite Love watching over her.
"God fills all space and there is nothing
outside of all," she says. Since God is the
source of all good and the loving Creator of
all that exists, then, Mary believes, He
must give each one of us good equally. A
passage from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy
inspired her: "When will mankind awake to
know their present ownership of all good…"
Mary prayed to understand more deeply the
spiritual law that God doesn't take from one
to give to another. All good is available to
everyone abundantly.
"I had as much good as this man did," Mary
says now, speaking of the senior vice
president. "It was right for me to have
customers who would bring business to me,
who liked working with me. There was plenty
of work for all of us."
Every
job can be broken down to the expression of
qualities.
Ultimately, Mary believes true
employment is employing God's qualities in
whatever you do—and you can do it 24/7.
Every job can be broken down to the
expression of qualities. Those qualities
were what the prospects wanted to work with,
not merely percentages, dollars and cents.
Thoroughness, intelligence, wisdom, common
sense, appreciation and interest in their
project—these expressions of God’s nature
would draw customers. Instead of
outmaneuvering her boss, Mary decided to
trust and rely on God to provide the
opportunities for her to express Him.
As her attitude changed about it, Mary began
to see that she was getting more leads that
had a higher probability of closing. And
close they did. "As I was going along, I
really wasn't watching the numbers or
focusing on that," she says now. "But I knew
that I was doing more business."
Imagine her delight when her boss told her
she had underwritten the most loans in her
department that year and it was double her
performance of the previous year. He even
selected her to go on an all-expense paid
trip to a leadership conference.
Mary still does business this way. Her
spiritual business “strategy” keeps her from
being flustered by economic downturns. She
no longer feels she's getting the small
piece of the pie, but has access to the
infinite source of goodness that's available
to everyone.
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